Kwame Kwei-Armah

Kwame Kwei-Armah is Maryland's best director in two senses. As artistic director of Center Stage, he has righted the foundering ship and set it on a promising path. He has repaired relations with the local theater community and has scrubbed off the academic snobbery that had grown up around the institution. As the director of specific productions, such as last April's The Whipping Man, he has provided an admirable model for a new kind of show at Center Stage: stripped of intellectual conceits and focused instead on the physical reality and roiling emotions of the characters onstage. Kwei-Armah is directing Center Stage's season-opener, An Enemy of the People, adapted by Arthur Miller from Henrik Ibsen.